Poem fractal

America the Beautiful

by Katharine Lee Bates

12 August 1859 to 28 March 1929 (~70)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Where Spanish life is most stripped of material prosperity, it seems most to abound in suggestions of romance.”

Contrasting material poverty with the imaginative richness she encountered in everyday life · Spanish Highways and Byways

More remarks (14)

Drawing the boundary…

Read the poem Another poem

A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. A poem can be drawn the same way.

The poem’s constant is read from the build of its lines: their length, the size of the stanzas, and the share of vowels. Poems whose constants lie closer together are built more alike. The same poem always draws the same picture. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.

Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.

Poems nearby in the constant

A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

  1. Tobias Hume · 0.2876 − 0.6437i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Hardy · 0.2598 − 0.6078i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
  3. Arthur Symons · 0.2880 − 0.6873i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
  4. Christina Rossetti · 0.2907 − 0.6899i · 0.047 away · Compare side by side
  5. Sara Teasdale · 0.3166 − 0.6189i · 0.047 away · Compare side by side
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